Psych 1000

My professors were Dr. Wolf and Dr. Esson. Dr. Wolf lectured for the first semester while Dr. Esson lectured for the second semester. Professor Wolf tended to keep lectures between 1 hour and 1.5 hours. If you had copied everything on her slides, it would have been very difficult to keep up, since most of the information that was on her slides was taken from the textbook. Only activities, videos, and information that appeared on black coloured slides really needed copying, since they were usually on the exam, but not in the textbook. Professor Esson usually lectured for 1.5 hours and had even more textbook material on the slides. Thus, the statement regarding note taking for Dr. Wolf applied to Dr. Esson too.

In my class, clickers were used to determine participation marks. Only participation (pressing a button) was necessary to acquire these marks. However, some other classes had “online discussions” instead, which were marked and graded.

Course review:

The course material itself was not difficult to understand. The concepts were fairly simple; the biggest challenge this course presented was the amount of readings assigned. The material did not scale up in difficulty from the first to second semester, though some people considered some chapters more interesting than others. Typically, each exam required 160-180 (four chapters) pages of reading.

The online quizzes were very easy, since they were open book tests and were tests of your memory. The difficulty of online discussions varied from class to class, but for the most part, they were marked fairly. Classes that used clickers during the year 2011 basically had a free 5%.

The exams were all multiple choice; the majority of questions came directly from the textbook. Non-textbook material (lecture material) composed roughly 15% of the exam. The majority of questions required simple recall/regurgitation of the textbook; not much problem solving ability was needed. The final exam was longer than the other exams, but did not require you to read any more than 160-180 pages. The exams were all roughly equal in difficulty. The majority of questions were fairly general, but there were a few on each exam that were very specific.

Advice:

Try to do all the practise exams that are posted up, since it gives you a good idea of the depth of memorization required. Also, sometimes a question reappears from a past exam.

The quizzes are also a good way to test your knowledge. Do them at least a day before the deadline, since servers tend to crash the day of the deadline.

Make sure you’re concentrated when you’re reading through the book and minimally distracted. It is possible to read 160-180 pages in ~20h (separated into two days) and do well if you study efficiently. Highlight only if you really find it helpful. Not only does it devalue the textbook, but it also takes up time. I don’t recommend taking notes for the readings (unless it’s a study strategy you cannot do without) because it’s very time consuming since the book is so long.

Ensure that you understand the gist of each paragraph. For some that means rereading it, for others it may mean making notes on it. The concepts are simple, but there is a lot to memorize, so it’s easy to miss something and not notice it until you think about what you just read.

I recommend this course for anyone who can memorize effectively. I don’t recommend this course if you don’t like a course that’s heavy on readings or if you have difficulty memorizing a lot of material.

Disclosure:

I'm currently in the second year of the biomed program and this was my first year elective. I have no previous knowledge of psychology, though much of what we learned was common knowledge.

This is generally a straightforward course. As long as you understand the materials in the textbook, you are good for exams. Exams are all multiple choice, and 90% of the grades come from MC exams. One exam covers 4 chapters (16 chapters in the textbook). Each chapter ranges from 35 – 55 pages in length and takes about 2–3 hours to read.

The 2 most popular profs were Dr. Mike and Dr. Laura. I had Dr. Laura and I felt that she was more willing and caring for her students; she held many study sessions and came up with her own review questions to help student prepare for exams. On the other hand, Dr. Mike has more experience and is very popular for his interesting lectures.

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University of Western Ontario, UWO, uwo western, undergraduate, western undergrad